Posted
by
Soulskill
on Tuesday January 15, 2013 @02:42PM
from the stalking-made-simple dept.

Today at a press conference in California, Mark Zuckerberg announced a big new feature from Facebook: Graph Search. It's a set of tools designed to quickly bring together social information involving "people, photos, places, and interests" in response to a user's query. Zuckerberg was quick to point out that they aren't indexing the web, and thus aren't challenging Google. However, it will use the vast volumes of data already stored on Facebook to answer questions like "What kinds of movies do my friends like?" and "Who are friends of friends that are single in San Francisco?" Addressing the obvious privacy concerns, the company said it wouldn't allow users to search content that wasn't already shared with them (or already public). The searched data does, however, include location data, if it's been shared — you can search by places your friends have been. Significantly, the official site also mentions that Graph Search will help you meet new people, something Facebook hasn't really highlighted until now. Graph Search is being rolled out as a limited beta, with only a few thousand participants. In the coming months, they'll open it to more users and continue working on mobile and non-English versions.

Not exactly. They will be selling the questions people ask so they can better sell the data that is used to support the questions. People may be going to movies but they are asking questions about the theaters (seats, A/C, concession prices, parking availability, etc). Advertiosers will then be able to target those questions in their ads.

Duhh the questions ARE additional data. Why, they could even be described as "additional levels of data" to be monetized. Monetized as in, "mined and sold to advertisers".

I am sorry but your primary school teachers grotesquely failed to instill in you any sort of skill at reading comprehension as evidenced by your completely redundant post. Remedial training is highly recommended.

Don't you understand? People who sign up for Facebook *WANT* these things - their pathetic lives would be even less without their "friends". Without Facebook, many people have NOTHING!

Your "Troll" mod was not because you said anything inaccurate. It is because we live in an increasingly emotionally immature society where the pleasantness of a thing is considered more important than the truth of a thing. It is the result of being governed by emotion and not reason. Whoever modded you "Troll" is like that. Sadly, many people are unable to calmly articulate their own opinion, so they need to "get back at you" in some way for offending them. After all, you didn't constantly say things like "well just my opinion" (something already understood) and "hope it doesn't offend anyone" (that is their choice) to kiss their asses and placate their desire to climb up on their high horse and cry about how terrible you are. Their self-importance and false sense of entitlement demand that you show such undue deference, you know.

Anyway, when you have real friends whom you love and respect like family members, and a satisfying social life, Facebook has no appeal. All Facebook offers that cannot easily be had elsewhere is the exchange of trivia with and casual attention from strangers or superficial acquaintences. The trade-off of losing so much irretrievable privacy in exchange for something so devoid of real value makes no sense. To those who are not starved for attention, it is all minuses and no plusses. The bandwagon it has become is also unappealing to those who are not herd animals, who don't find "everyone else is doing it" to be a valid reason to do anything.

I can certainly see how those who otherwise would have no satisfying social life might find it appealing. This merely constitues Facebook taking advantage of a weakness/shortcoming and exploiting it in order to make money. The disrespect they frequently show to their userbase and the obvious disregard of basic privacy concerns makes it inherently exploitative in nature. It's something that a healthy, happy person who is not needy would refuse to tolerate. Zuckerberg's contempt for his own users has been repeatedly established by his very own statements. This is someone people want to trust with so much personal data? It's absurd and indicates that many people have no idea whom they're dealing with, or simply no real discerning standards for themselves.

If someone has to data-mine and connect lots of different dots and perform all kinds of automated searches in order to find you, it is because you didn't want to be found. That's why such vast systems and huge databases were necessary to do something that is otherwise so simple. If you want someone to be involved in your life in some way, none of that would be needed.

I do agree with your premise that for people who have little else, this kind of attention may actually be welcome. Of course that is pathological, used as a terrible substitute for real fulfillment and real quality time with people who actually love and understand you. This should be obvious, but when lots of people want to legitimize something, the first thing they must do is create confusion and complicate otherwise simple things. When enough people do that, it can make the obvious seem controversial when really it is merely inconvenient (the gun control "debate" is that way - wow criminals don't obey weapons restrictions, who'da thunk it?).

Finally, I wonder: how many people would have had to face and overcome their personal social weaknesses if they hadn't had Facebook as a readily available crutch?

Thank you, as well. I don't write many multi-paragraph semi-rants like that anymore, but some things need to be said. I didn't exactly have to stand in line behind a bunch of others who were going to say it.

Relatively early in life one gets used to seldom (or never) feeling represented by the opinions of the majority. It's actually rather liberating, once you understand that (sadly) so few are choosing to think for themselves and look beyond the presented/suggested/marketed points of view.

I am not starved for attention. I have strong connections to friends and family. I enjoy FB because it helps me keep in touch with them. My friends use FB to organize activities and parties and get-togethers.

There are other plusses. Through FB I was reunited with one of my best friends from high school who had moved to my city.

You forgot about events and groups of people with common interests.Pretty much everyone I've ever met on the internet, I've also met in person, and most of my social life consists of scheduling or attending events via Facebook.

Anyway, when you have real friends whom you love and respect like family members, and a satisfying social life, Facebook has no appeal.

For you, and some others, probably. I don't know you can state this as a universal rule. For some, it's a TOOL that provides an additional way to maintain those friendships and build acquantances with people with similar interests. I like to bullshit with the SEC Football fans on their page during the season, for example.

Only if I can cross referances single girls of friends of friends who post less than or equal to 0 inspirational quotes with pictures per day (including but not limited to: jesus, them being a strong mom, something sappy about relationships, something about being a badass woman, what makes up a real man, their son and/or daughter and how much the love them, etc...)

I have to admit (not proud of it) but I was nearly going to stay up and wait for this announcement.

I love to watch the Stock Market and see how things go on the day-to-day, not really to put money down but just to simply observe. In any case, Reuters did post an article about this and it did receive some (not a lot) attention.

Sufficed to say FB's stock has been growing quite steadily at to this point back to $38 a share (IPO offering) but as soon as this new search feature broke being the next "big new thin

When I've wanted to know what movies my friends like, I'll probably have already talked to them about it.

On Facebook, though, I've got "friends" who are basically just people I shared some period of time and space with - e.g. high school classmates. I don't really care what movies they like, unless they're members of the tiny minority with whom I've kept contact over the decades.

BTW this is the exact same logic that made me immediately turn off Google's "social" search results when they enabled that last year (in a previous attempt to revive the moribund Google+). If I'm doing a Google search, it's because I'm asking a question my immediate friends can't help me with.

There's a lot of times I want to get in contact with an old classmate or colleague I'm not "friends" with anymore... this is a good way to do it. A lot of people change their email addresses more often than their Facebook accounts. I just keep everyone I'm not close with in a separate group (College, High School, Family, etc) that's locked down pretty tight. It's called networking... great for finding jobs, planning a vacation or something else my immediate friends can't help with but someone from my greate

What you fail to realize is that many people see virtual space as a way to become much more than they are. People "Friend" on FB because they are in need of attention and/or recognition. They epeen wave to feel important, and make themselves feel good by epeen waving. If they post "I ate froot loops" and their "friends" respond "zomg! I love froot loops" they believe that they have accomplished something. They have influenced their "friends", and can feel good about eating froot loops.

Not only that, but I seldom announce to my "friends" on Facebook (even though they are mostly really my friends) what movies I like or what products I like, etc. I might "like" a band I support, etc., but that's as far as it goes.

Facebook just doesn't have enough information about me to make most of these connections. It's not so much that I'm trying to keep a low profile with them, I just don't have the urge to share that kind of stuff, even face to face. Unless the question comes up. I'm not unwilling

I seldom announce to my "friends" on Facebook (even though they are mostly really my friends) what movies I like or what products I like, etc.

Maybe its public purpose is to help you and others share and search trivialities, but the private purpose is to provide feedback to astroturfers, those who hire astroturfers, crazy super fans, and self promoters on how far the astroturfers reach goes.

For example before I deleted my account I didn't log in or use it for a couple months (it was a slow gradual decline), so you can't simply count a guy who's not really a follower as a follower. Or something like that.

I think its interesting the discussion is being carefully and methodically framed by both sides as being solely for trivial deep as a rain puddle pop culture queries.

It would be interesting to data mine my "friends" for religious beliefs, political party membership, stuff that is at least theoretically more important. Or information to sell to potential employers. So according to my friends, illegal drugs are (select one) a) bad b) good c) too expensive. My friends think I should (select one) a) get marr

The more data points I learn about my "friends", the more depressed I get. Wow, Tom is worried about chemtrails... Oh, there is Dave suggesting the president should be assasinated... Wow, some of Gary's friends are commenting on a white power poster..

I recently deleted my account, I'd rather not know how stupid everybody is.

When I went to school, I assumed a certain level of intelligence for everyone. I slowly realized I had to ratchet down my expectations. Then I started working, and those expectations

With respect, if you think Google+ is moribund, then you haven't looked at it lately, or you haven't looked at it deeply enough. Among the active G+ members are the Large Hadron Collider (they hold live Q&A sessions on G+ frequently), MIT, American Physical Society, Cmdr. Chris Hadfield (commander of the International Space Station), Wil Wheaton...Active communities include a Python community, Android, IOS, Science, Physics, Social Science, Medical...Popular culture communities include Doctor Who, Star

Is anyone outside of the teenage girl crowd even paying attention to Facebook announcements anymore? I'm legitimately asking. I have a Facebook account that I log into maybe once or twice a year. And most of the circles I spend time in don't really use it much anymore either. Am I the only one that sees Facebook announcements and just shrugs with indifference?

DUMB families, that is. When you have Dropbox, SpiderOak, Microsoft's whatever-it's-called storage service, why in the name of the Unholy would you stick to Facebook?Yes, my sister shrugged when I had her go to a Dropbox link to download my kid's pictures, but I basically told her that's how I function and she either can go there or wait until she sees him directly. Or I could send the pictures to her through Yahoo Messenger Send File option.Bot NOT Facebook. No, thanks.

I'm in the process of uploading lots of old scanned family pictures to Facebook. The reason is that almost all my immediate and extended family is on Facebook. This way my cousin can provide a comment on whether that was actually at her parent's farm or the one down the road or some other incredibly important tidbit of information, and my sister can read this and comment on it. If someone tags my nephew in a photo, he gets notified that there's a baby photo of him up. It's social aspects like this that make Facebook much better (in many ways) than Dropbox. Of course, there are downsides too. For those who don't want to have anything to do with Facebook, I'm happy to upload the photos to Dropbox and send them the link.

So do I, but you do understand that it's not an either/or choice, right? Maybe you have a smaller family than me who all live in the same town. I have family all over the world, so I don't get to see them all as often as I'd like to.

My sister lives in another country, she has a Facebook account and is free to post whatever she wants in there. I choose not to do the same, and family members have a choice to acknowledge that or not. Their choice.

Is anyone outside of the teenage girl crowd even paying attention to Facebook announcements anymore? I'm legitimately asking. I have a Facebook account that I log into maybe once or twice a year. And most of the circles I spend time in don't really use it much anymore either. Am I the only one that sees Facebook announcements and just shrugs with indifference?

Actually, I thought the demographic went the other way -- most of my young nieces and nephews (18 - mid twenties) seem to have dropped off facebook, with very rare updates. On the other hand, the 30 year old and up parents and grandparents are still posting baby pics and talking about doctor's appointments.

This is more likely their News Feed algorithm adjusting your stories to those it thinks "interest" you more. When I still had a Facebook account I was annoyed that my feed was only showing me stories from friends that I cared little or nothing about, yet showed nothing of the friend *I* felt I wanted to know about.

If you go directly to their Facebook page you'll probably see that they're still quite active on Facebook, but your feed is not showing it due to Facebook's algorithm selectively filtering their posts out of it.

Naa, I've checked their facebook pages, and aside from a few "Happy birthday grandma" type posts, most of their pages are empty.... I asked my nephew where he went since he used to post interesting sites of the day nearly every day - he said after his friends stopped using Facebook, he moved to Pineterest.

Young users are fickle and there's not much friction preventing them from moving around. Facebook wants to create that friction by providing an ecosystem so broad and useful that no one will want to leav

They snapchat. Its basically a photo sharing app with sexting optimized features although the flyer was careful to note the optimized for does not necessarily equal exclusively used for... No I'm not involved don't have an account LOL, this is from one of those "parents learn about your kids life online" type of flyers I believe sent home from school, or maybe it was online, so its probably already months outta date. Facebook is seen as the place mom and dad hang out, so you can't "do stuff" without them so go somewhere else to socialize...

Stuff like this makes more net-savvy FB users less and less open about sharing their lives online. FB's become the virtual equivalent of the mall, a place for the masses and not just some cozy hangout where you can gather with friends and let your hair down. Here the pressure to conform becomes great, since standing out means you have to be either the star or the oddball accosted by security: your parents or those "friends" of yours horrified by your unconventional

Is anyone outside of the teenage girl crowd even paying attention to Facebook announcements anymore?

Spotted: D knows V who is dating K who can send MZberg a message without having to pay $100. OMFG she is sooo connected!

If the paragraph above made sense to you, you probably were forced to watch an episode of Gossip Girl by someone you know. That person who forced you to watch Gossip Girl will be very excited by facebook's announcement.

I use Facebook to keep in touch with friends that've moved out of town. Every time they offer a "new exciting privacy feature" it changes my default privacy back to public (from friends only) and I need to redo all my security settings. Now it looks like anything I might miss gets slurped-up in easy to search format.

What Facebook doesn't seem to realize is that my Facebook "friends" aren't really my friends - they are a large group of family and acquaintances. I don't think my taste in food and/or movies matches maybe 10% of my FB contacts. So if I do search for movies or restaurants my "friends" like, I'm not likely to get any better results than if I search Google.

Plus everyone I know would have to share a lot more information to make this service useful.

What you don't seem to realize is that Facebook doesn't care about what you think and who you think your friends are. Facebook is simply enlarging their HUGE database for mining profitable connections. It's all about gathering information and AFTERWORDS letting loose the statisticians and analysts. If there was not HUGE amounts of money involved, they would not do it.

The pencil-necked bean-counting abacas drivers at Facebook are tapping into the value of BILLIONS of pieces of ennui.

Rather than blowing it away outright (which some of the comments have done), let's think about it for a sec. There's some cool stuff going on here, and then a big question.

The cool stuff is the technology and innovation. Think about this for a sec - Facebook's engineers are essentially looking at a variety of signals to determine (a) intent and (b) likely outcome. The signals are getting increasingly complex - not simply keyword boolean queries any longer - and, to me, that's a fascinating growth and exten

Rather than blowing it away outright (which some of the comments have done), let's think about it for a sec. There's some cool stuff going on here, and then a big question.

The cool stuff is the technology and innovation. Think about this for a sec - Facebook's engineers are essentially looking at a variety of signals to determine (a) intent and (b) likely outcome. The signals are getting increasingly complex - not simply keyword boolean queries any longer - and, to me, that's a fascinating growth and extension of technology. It's innovation.

It was innovation 10 years ago, now it's what everyone is doing -- Google doesn't do a simple SQL query in a big database to determine the results and ads you see for a query - they mine data from Gmail and their ad network and combine your personal preferences to determine relevance.

Absolutely true; I suspect they've got some innovation in their analysis of imagery and "friend" social signals, something that Google may be working to catch-up on with Google+. But, yes, clearly intent and a number of other innovations have been happening elsewhere, over time.

Searching in more advanced forms beyond boolean (semantics etc.) is far far older than facebook - they are doing nothing interesting, indeed it is surprising how little they are extracting with this. "Photos of me when I was 19" - check variable for DOB of user - search photo database tagged with them within a 1 year period. There is very little "innovation" here.

They even got the BBC excited with the news of their news conference. Then the big announcement is this? Really? If it isn't going to turn into big piles of $$ for investors by this afternoon, they better have something earth-shattering coming in real soon. Right now they have a lot of shareholders who are nervous about how much money they lost in a hurry on opening day, and I don't see how this will help them (and I am most certainly glad to not be one of those investors).

Taking a quick peek at their stock ticker [google.com] on Google, I don't think the markets have been impressed at all, in fact more the opposite. That they are hyping up such a small feature enhancement as this so badly seems like they are completely out of any ideas to increase revenue and are down to grasping at any straws they can. I guesses at a long slow slide into mediocrity for Facebook in the aftermath of their IPO, and so far I've not seen anything that makes me think they might avoid that fate.

I agree. Now they are in the boy who cried wolf domain for the next 'big thing' they want to talk about. They had CNBC all in a titter this morningready to 'live blog' etc, CNBC is totally centred on the bottom line, this in their parlance would be a 'miss' since they were looking for wow (hardware, a goog competitor etc). No wow, just meh. Some CS folks at FB got to crack the spines open on their seldom used graph theory books from school.

Facebook is becoming grey. Many kids I know are spend their time on other service. Their parents spend their time on facebook monitoring what the kids are saying. Facebook is alienating kids by acting like their parents and suspending accounts.

But there is demographic that likes to conform, do what the popular kids are doing, even though, or because, they themselves are not popular. The greatest risk in these people lives is to go an unpopular movie or have the wrong clothes. Ever since Facebook left

But there is demographic that likes to conform, do what the popular kids are doing, even though, or because, they themselves are not popular. The greatest risk in these people lives is to go an unpopular movie or have the wrong clothes. Ever since Facebook left the college culture, this has been the demographic that kept it going.

One demographic. I see other demos that have a strong presence on FB whenever I log back in (once every few months or so): The exhibitionist (posts lots of artistic pictures and comments about herself and occasionally her kids - very amusing). The entertainer (local musician/dancer who uses FB as a marketing channel). The family fulcrum (an amiable extended family member who just likes to pull people together and is super nice). Smaller players in my feed: the emo grownup, the political activist, the h

Don't kid yourself, 99.9% of these searchers are going to be something along the lines of..
"Girls with mutual friends who became single in the last month"
"Single girls near me whose status contains 'drunkkk' more than twice a week"
Combine this with imaging searching = awesome
"Girls that have dated guys that look like me"

Don't kid yourself, 99.9% of these searchers are going to be something along the lines of.. "Girls with mutual friends who became single in the last month" "Single girls near me whose status contains 'drunkkk' more than twice a week" Combine this with imaging searching = awesome "Girls that have dated guys that look like me"

"Addressing the obvious privacy concerns, the company said it wouldn't allow users to search content that wasn't already shared with them (or already public). "

Translation:

"This is totally worthless without shared, public data, so we plan to completely fuck with our privacy settings a whole bunch before this rolls out so that we can make sure your data is public and shared."

"This is totally worthless without shared, public data, so we plan to completely fuck with our privacy settings a whole bunch before this rolls out so that we can make sure your data is public and shared."

Indeed -- Facebook regularly changes (publicly or quietly) various settings to "streamline" user experience and protect user privacy. But I am yet to see a single example where the default change did not expose additional information that used to be private. You'd think at least one move geared to "protect user privacy" would make something private, yet that never happens.

Facebook’s intent is really obvious – they are trying to replace “raw” Internet with the Facebook layer, and people would do all interactions: social, searches, shopping through their layer. This would render other companies like Google, Yelp, you name it obsolete. The problem however is in the details: how can anyone trust Facebook with their private data, searches etc. considering all the privacy issues, lack of user’s control over their data, etc.? Once you’re in the M

If you want privacy, don't willing share information on a public forum, like Facebook. Users are on the one hand using the site and all of its features, which presumably they find useful, and on the other bemoaning that the actions in which they publicly engage can be either aggregated or used by the company to - gasp - make money. Facebook has consistently responded to user privacy demands, or paid severely when they haven't (Instagram lost half its traffic in one month). As far as I'm concerned, they are

I know someone who regularly reposts and shares "activism" links, regarding riots in europe, pipelines in canada, and all those sorts of thing. This person has had their ability to post links and share those of others removed. No reason given. Guess their graph features were developed for that process and now it seems a shame not to make money from the idea.

What would you consider to be a more reasonable amount of CPU budget to spend on excluding search results from some queries? I'm surprised it's as high as 10%, but I never really thought of CPU usage as a metric for privacy protection.

Maybe a simple notallowed() function doesn't scale linearly across many PB of data.

In a simple situation, you have a table or simple ruleset describing everything that is allowed, and disallow everything else. In that case, isallowed() is cheap. Or you might have a table of all the things that aren't allowed, which is dumb as a box of rocks but still cheap. FB must instead have rulesets where the operation of the rule depends on knowing the graph of relationships, and maybe also the provenance of the data which you're talking about (was it shared by route A or by route B?). Evaluating tha